


trade your heroes for ghosts

by matchka



Category: Luther (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, Justin doesn't die, M/M, Post Season 3, Wish you were here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-05-26 16:02:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6246517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matchka/pseuds/matchka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Alternative title: Traumatic Pneumothorax Blues.)</p><p>post-season 3 fix-it fic.</p><p>In which Justin doesn't die, and John doesn't stay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	trade your heroes for ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> "How I wish, how I wish you were here.  
> We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year" - Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here
> 
> Season 3 broke my heart. I tried to fix it. I think I made it worse.

For Ripley, the handful of nanoseconds which elapse between the release of the bullet and the explosion in his chest are malleable, a liquid medium in which time exists only as a scientific possibility. There is only him, and the black, starless sky, and the pain in his lungs; the dull ache of a breath held in too long. That singular moment spans millennia, entire lifetimes in which Justin Ripley might have done things differently, done things  _better_.

And then it’s over.

 

#

 

All that follows is darkness. He can’t make sense of his own body, of the alignment of his limbs in relation to the searing pain at his core. He thinks he still has a face, but his mouth won’t move, his lungs won’t inflate, and the words dissipate before they’re ever formed.

Somewhere, someone is telling him to get up.

He tastes blood, feels it sweet-sour in his throat; the warm, thick gurgle of it every time he exhales. There’s a terrible weight on his chest and he can’t find his hands, doesn’t know how to shift it. He’s distantly aware of cobbles pressing into his spine. The pinprick patter of rain cold against his skin. He can’t remember how he got here, why he’s lying in the gutter somewhere with a throat full of blood.

_get up mate you have to get up_

_I can’t get up_ , he thinks, a little crossly,  _don’t you think I’d try if I could?_  It’s cold down here, and the pain is horribly persistent – not unbearable, and some part of him is surprised by that, because it ought to be, it ought to hurt more than anything in the world, more than rope tight against his windpipe, more than white hot steel and the smell of his own burnt flesh hot in the back of his throat. It ought to be agony. But it’s cold, and the ground is wet, and there’s blood in his lungs and he’s not ready to die yet.

Somewhere in the untethered chaos of his body, he finds his hand.

_get UP_

it takes everything just to move his fingers, one by one; barely a flutter, and he thinks of his dad, then, hardfaced and disapproving as he ever was in life:  _what do you want, a fucking sweetie? Keep moving._  So he does. He keeps moving, inching his fingers step by agonising step across the cobbles. It shouldn’t be so fucking  _difficult_.  

He finds a hand that isn’t his own. A warm palm closes around his fingers. Someone is shouting

_medic I need a medic here NOW_

and he feels a sudden blissful warmth as someone moves close, the slow burn of transferred body heat; a callused hand gentle against his face, wet with what he assumes is his own blood, and the voice again, quieter, a low whisper against his ear:  _justin it’s me, it’s john, I’m right here. don’t you bloody dare go anywhere, don’t you leave me._

He opens his mouth, tries to say ‘thanks boss’ but there’s blood in his mouth and a bullet in his chest; the words are buoyed on liquid, a pained last gasp spilling hot out over his lips. And then there are footsteps on the cobbles, and a mask over his mouth, a hellish accumulation of noises and voices; the pain is intense now, a lit fire at the centre of him, and even as they bundle him away John never once lets go of his hand.

#

He dreams of bloodstains slowly seeping through the ceiling.

Consciousness is a fragmented, half-remembered thing. He knows he is asleep far more than he’s awake, and that this is infinitely preferable to the reverse; he knows the walls are duck-egg blue and there’s always someone by the bed, just out of sight. And when he does wake – always fleeting, a few snatched moments in the hazy ether dream that constitutes his life now – that person comes to him, slips their fingers through his and whispers unintelligible things until the morphine conspires to drag him under again.

He wakes once with something lodged inside his throat, a terrible pressure forcing his airway shut; he’s weak but he reaches up, scrabbles for the rope he knows is around his throat and jesus, how can he possibly be back here? For a long and terrible moment he can feel blood in his hair, the ammoniac stink of the tunnel vivid and any minute now,  _any fucking minute_  Pell will be back.

(Once, he told John about it; the brief certainty that he was going to die down there, trapped and alone. That he hadn’t slept for a week afterwards, because every time he shut his eyes he was back there, with Cameron Pell and his lunatic smirk and the crowbar glowing white in the dark. He’d felt utterly pathetic for admitting it.

“Only a week?” John had said.)

There’s a sharp, sudden pain in his throat as something slides out, a wet, nauseous motion. He gasps reflexively, tasting cold air, antiseptic. He sucks in air like he might never have it again.

“Hey.” A hand smooths back his sweat-damp hair, gentle. “You’re okay, Justin. It’s okay.”

Everything hurts. From the roots of his hair to the marrow in his bones, he hurts. His head sinks back into the pillow, the thunder of his heartbeat subsiding just enough for him to pause, to focus, take in his surroundings. Hospital walls. A blonde nurse in his peripheral vision, watchful but distant, allowing him space. And there’s John, sitting at his bedside, exhausted but smiling; the space beneath his eyes is dark, his face crumpled, and even as the ever-present tide of exhaustion sweeps in, dragging Justin slowly back into unconsciousness, he is absurdly grateful that John’s smile should be among the first things he sees in his return to the world.

“You all right?” John asks.

His mouth is dry. “Hurts,” he manages – barely a whisper, but it’s a start.

John laughs at that. Smooths his hair some more. “Yeah mate,” he says, with no small amount of fondness. “I bet it does.”  

He relaxes into John’s touch. Lets his eyes slip shut. Next time, he’ll stay awake. Next time.

 

#

 

When he wakes again – hours or days or weeks later, he’s not sure – it’s not John at his bedside but someone else, someone he recognises from another life. A suburban house and the pulverised skull of a dog leaking blood and grey matter into the carpet. Separate beds making for happy marriage. Her smile is resplendent as his eyes flutter open; she might be a benevolent, red-lipsticked goddess, except he remembers her. Chilly, peculiar. Guilty as sin but clean, and clever.

She leans forward, eyebrows raised, as though about to impart some great secret.

“You,” she says, “have been asleep for a _very_ long time.”

He blinks. His eyes are not quite used to focusing, and she’s abundantly colourful – scarlet lips and auburn hair, green polo-neck and those sharp blue eyes, bright with good cheer, or possibly psychosis. There’s a tall get-well-soon card on the table beside his bed, a plastic vase filled with somewhat droopy flowers. He hadn’t thought they allowed flowers in hospitals any more.

The pain is still present, but receding; an outward tide drawing with it the tired ache of shattered bones and lacerated flesh. He can identify each of his limbs now. He considers that progress.

“Oh, hello Alice, lovely to see you,” she says, mimicking his accent with only partial success.

“I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is rough with disuse. “I um. I’m a bit confused.”

“You expected John?” She gets up. Her boots click on the linoleum as she crosses the room. There’s a jug of water on the bedside table, a beaker. She decants one into the other with great care, like she’s pouring out fine wine. “I’m afraid he had rather urgent business to take care of. I suppose I’m acting as his representative. His deputy, if you like.” She passes him the beaker. His hands are clumsy as he takes it from her; the channel of communication between brain and fingers is still somewhat out of sync. She helps him raise the beaker his mouth, a weirdly affectionate gesture. He’s not sure how he feels about that. “Shame, really. He was really quite invested in being here when you woke up.”

The water is stale and lukewarm, like it’s been sitting out for days. He realises he would kill for a pint right about now. “Why you, though?”

Her eyes light up. Sunshine on seaglass. “Oh, but that’s a long story,” she says. He knows she’s waiting for him to say it – _go on, tell me -_ because she’s got a flair for the dramatic and it’s so much more fun with a rapt audience. And although he’s tired, and sore, and still not entirely certain how he came to be here, he indulges her. Because he does want to know, and she’ll tell it so well.

“I’ve got time,” he says.

She seems visibly delighted at his compliance. “Are you comfortable?” she asks. And then, without waiting so much as a half-second for his response: “I suppose it _really_ started with Lucien Burgess…”

#

Alice talks for a long time. She talks about Burgess and the state of play. She talks about Ian Reed – pausing mid-tale to express her apparently sincere admiration (“You let John _hit_ you,” she says, red lips curled upwards. “You _asked_ him to hit you. My goodness, that’s devotion.”) She talks about Stark and Erin in the stairwell, about Mary Day and the way Marwood had tried to force Luther’s hand. “He asked him to choose,” she says. “Mary or me. And he chose smart. He chose right.” She sighs, mock-wistful. “She is such a _nice_ girl, Mary. She’s just a little dull, that’s all. A bit pedestrian. But you know, she sat in the police station for four hours, entirely of her own volition so that I could make my getaway. I suppose one has to be grateful for kind gestures.”

“But you’re still here,” he says.

“I’m still here.” She examines her nails, fingers fanned out before her. Even in his slightly morphine-addled state Justin can sense her displeasure at the change of subject. “I’m still here because _he_ is still here. And he’s still here because he can’t bear the idea that you might die alone.” She leans forward suddenly, mouth creasing into a wide grin. She reminds him of the Joker, he thinks, from the Batman cartoons he watched as a kid. That same maniacal intensity in every moment of joy. “I met your mother briefly,” she says. “Charming lady. Irish, isn’t she? Second generation? I told her I was your girlfriend.”

Oh good Christ, he thinks.

“She seemed really quite pleased. I expect she was afraid she might never have grandchildren. Not from you, anyway.”

He chooses not to dignify her with a response. He knows when he’s being needled. He struggles to reach the beaker on the bedside table, making agonisingly slow progress; he thinks he can feel stitches pulling somewhere in the region of his sternum, and his abdominal muscles are painfully taut, stretched out over bruised insides. She doesn’t offer to help this time, and he’s somehow grateful for that; perhaps she understands that he needs to do this himself. Or perhaps she’s punishing him, wearing her sudden ignorance of his plight like a badge the way cats studiously ignore those who offend them. He sips warm water, feels it trickle down into the empty pit of his stomach. How long has he been here? How long since he ate anything? The IV taped to his inner elbow speaks of nutrition in a bag. He’s not even sure he’d be able to chew.

“Not to worry,” she says, after a time. “He’ll be back soon. He doesn’t like to leave you for too long. He blames himself for what happened.” She purses her lips, matronly disapproval. “He does love you, you know. Perhaps not quite the way you love him, but…”

“It wasn’t his fault,” he interrupts, doggedly certain, though he has no empirical evidence to attest to this; his memory of that evening is faulty, recalled only partially, and in stuttering stop-motion. The point is, he _knows_. It would never be John’s fault. John would never knowingly put him in danger.

She smiles. He thinks it’s genuine.

“No,” she says. “But then, it never is.”

 

#

 

It’s late when he finally arrives. Justin can hear him arguing with one of the nurses, urgent whispers increasing in volume until she relents; visiting time was over an hour ago, she reminds him with undisguised contempt, and Justin knows he’s pulled rank, flashed his badge. Technically, it doesn’t mean a thing; Justin is not a suspect in need of questioning, he’s a naïve idiot who got himself gutshot. He’s a colleague. That’s all.

The room is dark save for a striplight above the bed, emitting a faint sunset glow. John’s dressed all in grey, a shadow slipping in through the door. His face is drawn but his eyes are smiling, relief palpable as he meets Justin’s quizzical gaze.

He sits on the bed. The springs creak beneath the extra weight.

“You’re alive, then,” John says.

“More or less,” Justin replies. God, it’s good to see him, the reassuring solidity of his shoulders, that rigid line upon which the entire world sits. He’s a pleasantly sobering sight after the surreal interlude with Alice. “They’re talking about moving me out of the HDU in a few days. I’ll be on the ward with all the other plebs.”

John frowns. “You’re not going home yet?”

He waves a dismissive hand. “Risk of infection, blood clots, all that. I’m under observation until they’re happy with my recovery.” It’s in his nature to underplay just how serious his condition was. Is. He’s still not sure how much work they did on him. He doesn’t know the full nature of the injuries he sustained. Maybe when he’s not feeling quite so much like a human jigsaw puzzle he’ll ask them. (“You’ve been opened more times than a whore’s legs,” Alice had said, gleeful in her profanity.) “But I’ll be out soon. I feel a lot better already.”

“Yeah?” John says. “’Cos you still look like shit.”

“Bit rich coming from you,” Justin replies. “Have you slept at all lately?”

He laughs. It’s a beautiful sound. “Yeah, you’re on the mend all right. Can’t say I missed your nagging, though.” He runs a palm down his face, pulling the skin taut. He’s unshaven, crumpled; his shirt is as creased as his face, like he hasn’t changed it in days. Justin feels a familiar worry gnawing in the pit of his stomach, the ever-present fear of Luther’s recklessness, the finger hovering eternally over the self-destruct button. The irony is not lost on him. “I’ve not slept much, mate,” John says. “With everything going on, you know…and not knowing if you were going to wake up again. It’s not much of an incentive.”

He swallows, a little nervously. “Was it that bad?”

John doesn’t reply, but the look on his face speaks volumes. Justin hears Alice’s voice in his head, the ghost of their prior conversation: _he blames himself for what happened._

_He does love you.  
_

_Not quite the way you love him, but…_

“I don’t blame you,” he blurts, and wishes he could stuff the words back in his stupid mouth; it’s the way John looks at him, that naked self-reproach, the sudden slump of his shoulders. They could’ve gone months without having this conversation. Years, even. They might never have had it at all, and John would’ve known, because he knows Justin, knows the way he thinks.

“I know,” John says. And then: “You should.”

He can’t argue with that because he doesn’t remember, and a part of him – some small, insistent part he’s kept buried since that business with Ken Barnaby, some _blasphemous_ part – is afraid to ask. He reaches out, brushing fingertips against John’s knuckles, an awkward, silent gesture: _it’s okay. We’re okay._ John’s hand finds it way atop his. They sit that way for a little while, and entire conversations are conducted in the way their hands fit together, the comfortable way they come to rest beside Justin’s thigh.

“I came to say goodbye,” John says.

And that hurts more than a bullet ever could.

 

#

 

For Ripley, the months that elapse between the bullet splintering his ribcage and his return to work are malleable. They are marked by absence: the empty desk at the station which everyone doggedly insists belongs to DS Ripley, though for a while nobody is certain that he’ll ever be coming back. The chill of his empty flat when he returns, still a little bruised, a little delicate; he cracks open a window in a bid to clear the musty, unlived-in smell. There’s a bottle of milk in the fridge that he swears has gone completely solid. It’s strange, the total silence; he’s used to the perpetual motion of the hospital ward, heart monitors and squeaky linoleum. For the first week he has to leave the radio playing at night just to fall asleep.

And John.

Justin stares out of the kitchen window as the kettle boils, watching cars pass out on the high street. He doesn’t know where John is now. He’d made vague allusions to Mexico, Marrakech: “All the M’s,” he’d said. Alice’s idea, them running away together. Well it would be, wouldn’t it?

He sits on the sofa. Presses his hand against his abdomen, the grotesque patchwork of scars and sutures he knows lies beneath his shirt. He’d been appalled, that first time staring at himself in the shower; the yellowish bloom of old bruises interlaced with livid, half-healed incisions, permanent souvenirs from the multiple surgeries which saved his life. He’ll never be the same. On balance, he thinks that’s probably a good thing.

 _I’ll come back for you_ , John had said. _I don’t know when, but I will._

When he finally returns to work, he’s DCI Ripley, and there’s a team of new faces eager for his input. They’ve heard about Pell and Marwood. They think he’s a hero. Justin is typically nonplussed by the sudden rise of his star, and Schenk’s good-natured amusement leads Justin to conclude that the legend of DS Ripley, the world’s most unlikely hard bastard, is one sown and nurtured entirely by Luther in the weeks before his departure.

“Good to have you back, boss,” Benny says, patting him on the shoulder.

“I don’t think that’s ever going to sound right,” Justin replies, but he’s glad. Because this is all he ever wanted, isn’t it? To be a policeman, to be the best. To be as good as John Luther. And nobody could say he hasn’t earned it: he’s shed the sweat and tears and more than his share of blood. But it doesn’t feel right. And even when he solves his first case – a series of apparent suicides traced back to a virulent serial blackmailer – there’s a certain sadness in returning to that same office, to that same desk, acutely aware that something important is missing.

He tries not to think about John too much these days.

The postcard turns up a few weeks after he returns to work. It’s a glossy picture of a beach, all pale gold sand and gloriously blue sky. The text across the front reads ‘Greetings from Acapulco!’ He holds it between thumb and forefinger, staring at the turquoise waves frozen mid-ebb, because it’s easier to do that than turn it over, read what’s inscribed, properly acknowledge John’s absence for the first time since setting foot back in this office.

“What’s that, then?” Benny materialises beside him, squinting down at the postcard. It’s all Justin can do not to stuff it in his pocket and pretend it was never there. Not that you can hide anything from Benny, anyway. He’s a constant observer; very little gets past him.

“Ah, just an old mate,” Justin says. He’s aiming for ‘nonchalant’ but he can’t keep the melancholy from creeping in, just enough so that Benny offers him a small, knowing nod before he departs: _all right, your business._

When he’s sure he’s alone, he turns it over.

 _I’ll come back for you,_ John had said.

It’s addressed to ‘DCI Justin Ripley’. Someone has underlined ‘DCI’ multiple times, as though it matters very much. Beneath that, scrawled in lowercase is a single sentence, and somehow he can sense the sincerity in each word: _wish you were here._

**Author's Note:**

> all I want is for john, alice & justin to run away together somewhere warm, where the drinks have little umbrellas in them and they can all be happy together


End file.
